Grizzly

Grizzly is a simple API wrapper around the Weibo API V2. The name comes form the awesome Koala gem for facebook.

Grizzly as a name was already taken on ruby gems. Awww. However grizzly-weibo was not. To install using bundler add the following to your gem file.

gem "grizzly-weibo", :require => "grizzly"

To start using grizzly you want to create a client object. This client object allows you to interact with weibo api. This can be done creating a new object of type Grizzly::Client. You will need an access token to do this. Currently grizzly does not support authentication with oauth. If you need to do this then I recommend using omniauth. There is already a working strategy for Weibo.

client = Grizzly::Client.new(access_token)

Once a client object has been created we can use it to download information based on a user id. Just call the user method and pass it a single parameter. This is the uid of the user on Weibo. This method will return a user object with all of the user data.

user = client.user(11223344556677)
user.name             #=> "fredchang"
user.gender           #=> "m"
user.followers_count  #=> 53

First things first. Lets update the users status. This only works after a user has been logged in and has an access token.

client = Grizzly::Client.new(access_token)
status = client.status_update("Dude. Weibo is awesome!")

Weibo supports adding comments to status updates. All comments for a status can be fetched in the following way. Note that we pass the id of the status that we are intrested in

comments = client.comments(status.id)

Note that all method calls made with Grizzly will always return a domain object. More often than not this domain object is a representation of what ever JSON object has been returned by Weibo's API. In this case we get all sorts of handy information on the status we just updated including the user that the status belongs to. So you can do...

status.user.id    #=> "1233344545356356"
status.text       #=> "Dude. Weibo is awesome!"

You can access a list of friends by supplying a weibo user id

friends = client.friends(user_id)

This method will return an array of user friend objects. Data of these objects can be accessed via methods

friends.first.id            #=> "1233344545356356"
friends.first.screen_name   #=> "Fred Chang"
friends.first.gender        #=> "m"

You can convert a user object to a hash if you need to however use . syntax where you can. Makes the code look cleaner

friends.first.to_h["screen_name"] #=> "Fred Chang"

Returns a list of your bilateral friends on Weibo. This list has users who are a fan of you and your are a fan of.

friends = client.bilateral_friends(user_id)

This method returns the same friend object that client.friends returns.

Weibo API supports paging. Both the friends and bilateral_friends are paginated. This means that when we call these methods we have a cursor object returned. This cursor object can be iterated over. Iterating in this way will only iterate over the first 50 results

friends = client.friends(user_id)
friends.each do |friend|
  ...
end

For something a little more robust we can iterate over pages as well. This will get all of a users friends iterating over them in blocks of fifties. Note that each time you access friends.each an new request to the weibo api will be generated.

friends = client.friends(user_id)
while friends.next_page? #Loops untill end of collection
  friends.each do |friend|
    ... # Loops 50 times
  end
end

Grizzly has its own set of errors that it can throw. Grizzly::Errors::NoAccessToken is thrown when the client is created with out an access token. Grizzly::Errors::WeiboAPI is thrown when ever there is an error returned by an end point of the API. This will return both a message and a weibo error code. Grizzly::Errors::Timeout will be thrown when the Weibo API is taking too long to respond to a response. There currently is a five second limit on the request time of each request made by Grizzly. Note that when your using a cursor class described above this time out applies to each request the cursor makes not the total time that the cursor takes to build the results of a given GET from the api.

Please feed free to fork, develop and send pull requests. If you plan to do this then you will need a valid weibo access token. Place this token in an access_token.yml file that can be found under the spec folder. Currently this file is in the git ignore list however you can copy the same file. Once you have done this add your access token to the file and specs will pick it up.

The changes are that what you want to do with the API is not supported. Let me know if that is the case and I will add support for anything you need to do. I will also accept any pull requests with new features included. I did not intend to release this gem full supported with each end point mapped.

• realalien (Zhu Jia Cheng)

Copyright (c) 2012 Stewart Matheson

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